When you play video games, and look through your friends list, do you ever see "last seen 9 years ago"? Is there a friend you haven't heard from in a long while? A YouTube channel that abruptly stopped uploading on a regular schedule?

What kind of feeling does that give you? Do you ever feel concerned, or curious, wondering if the person is still alive and well, and if so, what they do nowadays? Do you have a name for this feeling?

I have encountered this feeling many, many times before, though I never knew if it had a name. Thus, I have decided to name it, and as a bonus, document it, right here. I decided to name it the dormant person feeling in English, though it has a second, much older name in Thiguka, one of my constructed languages, patalara.

I feel it strongly; to the point where when I encounter such a dormant person, I will often look around and do some investigations, maybe input some keywords in a bunch of search engines, just to determine if the person is still alive, because it's the only way to hold back the patalara. Going down the rabbit hole, you could say. But in this case we're sending a highly professional drilling crew and cave diving team down the hole, with how seriously I take these investigations sometimes.

Usually, the person leaves behind a "web". Links to other socials, and the same username on other websites. Breadcrumbs and puzzle pieces for the Internet archaeologist. Sometimes, there will be more recent activity on these other accounts, recent and reassuring signs of life.

There are of course, reasons why people stop abruptly. Real life gets in the way; people get new jobs, new hobbies, enter financial hard times and lose the ability to pay the hosting bill, or in rare but sad cases, die.

As an example of patalara, we will be showing you the most recent YouTube video of a randomly selected YouTuber, Amber Katelyn Beale. She was active throughout the 2010s and quite well-known, but by the 2020s, had faded into obscurity. Beale is one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who have gone dormant. The video in question is titled Bay to LA. It is from 2018-03-08; over seven years ago as of writing. Now for some quotes.

(YouTube, why do you have to always use relative timestamps? For once, please show YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format when you hover upon it. Is there a browser extension for this?)

Going down the comments, there's talk of other things that have happened in Beale's life, but that's off-topic.

I included these comments, and bothered with mentioning Beale, since this is anecdotal evidence that I'm not the only one with the dormant person feeling. It's common.

I may not even be the first one to coin a term for this feeling, but extensive Internet searches have turned up very little.

When digging through the internet to see if they are still alive; something I do to try to relieve the feeling, there will often be link rot.

That video Beale posted? It could disappear at any moment. In fact, her Instagram is now private as of 2025-08-11. This blog? Not immune. I might stop caring about it and one day, forget to pay a hosting bill, and just like that, you'll be reading this website only on the Internet Archive.

This of course can happen for plenty of reasons. Accounts get deleted. Websites get restructured. Companies just run out of money all of a sudden and take down the entire site.

People might intentionally delete older things, wanting to move past that embarassing part of their life. I've had similar embarassing phases before, from when I was a lot less mature. I don't bother with actively preserving it anymore, but it exists on the Wayback Machine, on archive.org, or whereever the archives are, even if it has since long disappeared from the original websites due to inactivity.

It is possible, given enough effort and time, to connect that embarassing account I had years ago, with this blog; to prove that they are the same person, though the immense change in my opinions and beliefs will make it harder. That's a good thing. Being embarassed about your past shows that your standards have improved drastically; that you've grown; and that you're better now than you were when you posted whatever it was you posted so long ago.

I can say with certainty however, that the feeling of patalara ties in with my archival mindset. As I continue to browse the Internet, everytime I run into a blog from the late 2010s, the feeling will always pay my mind a visit.

And if ever, anyone reads this in 2030, let this be a light into the future. The feelings you will have when you see the date being 10 years ago, or however many years ago, are valid. I can't guarantee that I'll still be alive and well and using the Internet in 2030, but we'll just have to see what life throws at us.

Note: I originally wrote this around 2025-08-11, but didn't finish it. I went back here and finished it up, and published it on 2025-09-05.